


Delirium

by Calacious



Category: Hawaii Five-0 (2010)
Genre: Caretaker!Steve, Crack Treated Seriously, Cuddling, Fever, Fluff, Hallucinations, Kissing while under the influence of a fever, M/M, Pre-Slash, Sick!Danno
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-25
Updated: 2019-11-25
Packaged: 2021-02-26 03:00:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,517
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21556639
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Calacious/pseuds/Calacious
Summary: Danny's got a fever. At least he hopes that's why he's seeing an entire circus parading around Steve's living room in the middle of the night. If it's not a fever, that means he must be losing his mind.
Relationships: Steve McGarrett/Danny "Danno" Williams
Comments: 16
Kudos: 182





	Delirium

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by a prompt that I heard while listening to a NaNoWriMo live virtual write-in. 
> 
> This is set in the mind of Danny who is delirious with a fever, and is not medically accurate, nor is Steve's care for him particularly medically sound. It is also rather nonsensical in places, because I'm taking you on a trip through delirium. 
> 
> Potential trigger: Danny does kiss Steve while under the influence of the fever. If that is triggering for anyone, do not read. He's in the bath at the time, but has boxers on. Steve does not take advantage of Danny while he's in a feverish state. Danny's not one hundred percent aware of what he's doing in the tub, but once he's out of the tub and wakes up, he is more than aware of the fact that he kissed Steve and he wants to kiss Steve again.

Delirium: an acutely disturbed state of mind that occurs in fever, intoxication, and other disorders and is characterized by restlessness, illusions, and incoherence of thought and speech. (Oxford dictionary, online)

Danny's lost his mind. There's no other way to explain the pink unicorn that he sees tap dancing across Steve's living room floor, or the tutu wearing hippo that's drinking tea. He blinks, they're still there, and now a giraffe in a top hat has joined them. He closes his eyes for a count of ten, hoping that when he opens his eyes he'll be alone in Steve's living room and not surrounded by a menagerie of fantastical animals.

He opens his eyes, and wishes he hadn't. There's a trio of penguins wearing black vests and bearing trays with tiny cocktails that have ice cubes shaped like fish. A black bear is balancing on a large beach ball, smiling and waving a paw at a family of white foxes that is sitting in lawn chairs spread throughout the room. Danny wonders how they can all fit in such a limited space. Either someone spiked the punch at the charity ball with some kind of hallucinogenic drug, or Danny’s got a fever. He’s rational enough to think of this before his mind is overtaken by a kaleidoscopic parade of multicolored mink dressed as elephants, horses, and people that Danny recognizes.

Steve makes a rather handsome mink, he thinks before another rational thought slips through and he realizes that maybe he should seek out the real Steve and get some help, no matter how adorable mink Steve is when he winks at Danny and blows him a kiss. It’s mildly disconcerting, yet Danny blows a kiss in return and then he’s got a lapful of mink Steve.

Another discordant thought enters the fantasy that Danny’s mind is tripping him through, and it’s all that Danny can do to catch onto the tail end of the thought and hold it long enough to speak the thought. He sees sparks, and the word is lit up in neon colors that flash behind his eyes. It’s pretty and blinding at the same time.

“Steve.”

The mink stands on its back legs and takes Danny’s face between its paws and kisses him on the nose, then it settles back on Danny’s lap and chitters away at him. Danny thinks that if he was smaller, he might understand what mink Steve is saying.

Laughing, Danny reaches out to pet mink Steve, but before his hand can reach the dark, silky fur, mink Steve disappears with a ‘pop’ like a bubble bursting. Disappointed, Danny lets his hand fall to his lap and tries not to cry.

“Why’d you leave?” he asks the empty air.

The bear pauses on its circuit around the room, giving Danny a perturbed look. The fox parents look at him as though he’s lost his mind, and there’s a thread of thought that reminds Danny that he has, in fact, lost his mind. He wonders if he’ll ever find it again. If he’ll ever be able to find mink Steve, and tell him how much he loves him. Because he does. Love him, that is. Mink and not-mink Steve. He loves them both. He hopes that they won’t be jealous of each other if they ever meet. If he ever tells them.

“Danny?”

A disembodied voice, the color of a spring day just after winter snows have melted, startles him.

The voice grows hands and a face, like a spider. Danny’s met a spider once. Maybe more than once. He didn’t know they could talk. He wonders if the spider can tap dance like the unicorn, or if it does ballet or break-dancing instead. A break-dancing spider would be a wonderful sight to see.

“Danny.”

The hands have eyes and a mouth. They don’t belong to a spider at all. Danny frowns and sighs. He doubts that he’ll ever see a break-dancing spider now. More’s the pity, he thinks.

The mink parade has made their way around the room and they’re all looking at him expectantly, like he’s the master of the ceremony. There’s an itching sensation behind his left eye, and his right eye is doing cartwheels. It’s rather unhelpful and makes his stomach go a little topsy turvy.

He can feel tiny, beady eyes looking at him, waiting for answers. Waiting for directions. Waiting for Danny to take up the master’s whistle and blow. The hand eyes are staring at him, too. They’re blue, and filled with so much emotion that Danny’s not sure what to do with it.

There are too many eyes. Too many eyes, and is that a heartbeat that he hears? No, it must be a drum. It’s loud and Danny raises his hands to cover his ears, but his hands never make it that far. They get stuck between the hands with blue eyes and a downward turned mouth.

It’s unsettling. Unnerving. Unhinging. Un…un…un-unning.

_Unning._

_Inning._

_Baseball._

_Stats._

_Cards._

There’s a card-dealing rat wearing a grey and red sweater vest and a dealer’s visor hat. It’s green. He looks like a Christmas tree. A small, rodent Christmas tree, minus the bright lights and ornaments.

The game is blackjack. The players, weasels. There’s not an honest one among the boogle, Danny thinks. Or is that a confusion? A confusion of weasels. Danny watches them carefully. They all have the same black leather jackets and matching red bandanas wound around their tiny, furry heads. They’re clearly a gang. He should probably warn the rat.

“Danny.”

The voice breaks his train of thought, and he blinks at the hands with eyes. They’re insistent and bluer than the ocean. Bluer than the mink dressed like a whale. Bluer than…blue.

“What’s wrong with you, partner?”

The voice does not sound happy. Maybe it should stop to watch the parade, or the juggling lion clowns who are just now getting out of a car that is much too tiny to fit them all.

Danny laughs. Lion clowns are hilarious. They can’t juggle. Their makeup is ridiculous, and their feet much too big.

The hands with eyes pull him into an embrace and Danny watches a pair of monkeys in leotards walk a tightrope. They’re talented.

“What’s that?” the voice asks.

“It’s amazing that they don’t fall,” Danny says, watching the most amazing tightrope show he’s ever seen. “They’re wearing roller skates, and one of them is blindfolded.”

“O—-kay.” The voice does not sound impressed. The hands with eyes touch Danny’s forehead, and pull back with a hiss.

“You’ve got a fever,” the hands announce.

A small slice of reality seeps in past the elephants on the trapeze, and Danny’s inner, rational voice says, ‘Told you so,’ in a very snooty tone. ‘None of this is real.’

“Hands with eyes,” Danny says, answering his snooty inner voice with facts that cannot be rationalized away by snooty inner voices who think they know everything. They don’t. “Mink Steve. Shh. Don’t tell Steve, Steve that I love him. Shh. It’s a secret. I love you, too.”

“A secret, huh?” the hands with eyes sound rather smug and gentle. Gentle smugness. It’s an odd quality for hands with eyes and a mouth to have.

“Let’s get you cooled down.”

The hands with eyes and a mouth have lips. They’re cool and dry, and Danny hopes that mink Steve isn’t watching. He doesn’t want the mink to be jealous, especially not when Danny leans into the lips and wishes he could bathe every inch of himself their cooling embrace. A soothing lip bath.

“Let’s get you into a real bath, then we’ll discuss this whole lip bath business,” the hands with eyes say. They sound like they’re trying not to laugh, and not succeeding at it very well.

Danny should probably be offended. It’s hard to be offended, though when there’s a knife-swallowing dove hovering in mid-air.

“Yeah, we’ve really got to bring this fever down,” the hands with eyes and a mouth say, and the lips are gone.

Danny misses the lips, and he groans out a protest when the hands with eyes and a mouth make him stand and lead him out of the living room circus. He cranes his head back, trying to get once last glimpse of the show before it disappears behind him.

A silent ape leads the way up the stairs. Solemn, it gives Danny a sad look before disappearing in a cloud of fireflies that spell out giant words like skywriters.

_SAFE._

_HOME._

_STEVE._

_LOVE._

The fireflies vanish in smoke, and then Danny’s plunged into an icy Hell that reminds him of that one murder case he’d worked when he was still a rookie in New Jersey. It was winter. The blood had frozen the dead teen’s body to the sidewalk. A chainsaw, a crowbar, and a pickax had been involved in getting the body removed from the scene and into a body bag. They’d had to bring that section of the icy sidewalk with the body to preserve it.

Danny’d had nightmares for months. Catching the killer had helped, and Danny hadn’t thought of that case in years. He hates being reminded of it now. The teen’s lips had been a solid blue, stretched wide in what Danny had assumed was a plea for help.

He misses the circus, and wonders if mink Steve will come to save him. He tries to jerk free of the icy Hell, but an octopus has him trapped in its stern, punishing grip, and Danny sobs. The octopus tightens its eight-legged grip around him, and he can’t breathe.

He can’t breathe, the teen’s dead eyes are staring up at him through the cool veneer of Hell’s grimy basement kitchen window, and Danny can’t escape. He can’t escape the cold grip of ice that bites into his skin with razor sharp teeth, or the dead eyes of a teenage boy murdered by his own father because he’d liked other boys.

The octopus is trying to drown him. The fireflies are back, spelling their words above Danny’s head in a frenetic frenzy of fiery swirls that make Danny dizzy.

One word blazes in his mind long after the fireflies have ceased their incoherent ramblings. It’s the one word that Danny knows will get him the results that he’s looking for. The one word that will bring him back to safety.

Between one breath and the next, Danny manages to choke the word out before his skin is set on fire.

“Steve!”

“Danny, it’s okay,” the hands with eyes bluer than a Smurf’s bare butt say. “It’s okay. I’ve got you.”

Danny doesn’t want the hands with eyes and a mouth. He wants Steve. Steve will slay the killer octopus and pull Danny from the very depths of Hell. He will face the dead eyes of a teen that Danny couldn’t save and take Danny away from all of it. Steve will be his saving grace, if he can hear Danny above the trumpeting of the ten thousand elephants marching around downstairs.

“Steve,” Danny repeats the safe word, the word that means more than just ‘safe’. It also means ‘love’ and ‘home’. It means everything. Mink Steve will just have to be content to share if he’s not disappeared completely after Danny’s swept out of the icy depths of Hell.

“I’m here, Danny,” the hands with eyes say. They’re swimming in front of Danny with all of the grace of a narwhal from the North Pole, dancing on ice. Hell’s ice.

“Hell,” Danny says, teeth chattering. “Is an icebox.”

“O—kay.” The hands with eyes don’t sound convinced. They can’t seem to grasp the depths of Danny’s agony, or appreciate just how hard it is for Danny to stay afloat with an octopus trying to drag him down, down, down.

“Steve.”

The word feels like a chant. It’s a headache running, tumbling down a green meadow filled with those prickly little thistles that look pretty until their thorns get stuck beneath a thumbnail.

But that’s not right, Danny thinks, a slip of coherent thought reminds him that Steve is not the headache, though another train of thought derails that as an echo of something from the past insists that Steve is, indeed, a headache. Not one of those nasty ones that steal the joy from light and make it bite and stab, but one of those annoying, pestering headaches that just buzzes at the back of one’s mind, like a wayward bee looking for its honeycomb.

“Queen bee,” Danny says. His teeth are chattering. His skin is an ice flame. He’s Elsa, or maybe Anna. Or maybe he’s just the ice, or that strange little bit of snowman that doesn’t understand what melting is. Or maybe he’s the one who thinks that every new day is his birthday. _Happy Birthday!_

“That’s not for another two months, Danno.”

How do the hands with eyes know when Danny’s birthday is? Are they reading his mind?

“You’re hallucinating, buddy,” the hands with eyes say. They’re far more solemn than they should be. They sound like wise old owls lecturing a young child. Eeyore watches with grave approval and Piglet looks worried. Pooh does, too. Honey drips from the tip of his round, yellow paw.

Mink Steve winks at Danny over the rising tide of ice, and Danny didn’t even see him come in. One second there was a llama balancing precariously on an iceberg, and the next, there was mink Steve in all his silky glory, winking at Danny like everything was a-okay.

“If there wasn’t a hurricane, we’d be heading to the hospital,” say the hands with eyes bluer than the blue in Charlie’s Superman pajamas.

“No!”

Hospitals are white.

Cold.

Colder than ice, and Danny’s not ready to die just yet.

Hospitals are blood and red, and beep, beep, beeeeeeeep.

_Stat._

_Code blue._

_Blue eyes._

_Steve._

Steve’s okay. Steve is warm like butter on popcorn with salt, and fuzzy blankets, and thick socks.

“Okay,” say the hands with eyes and a mouth that is thinned out. Stern.

Mink Steve chitters in Danny’s left ear, nuzzles his chin, but Danny doesn’t want mink Steve. He wants Steve, Steve.

“I’m here,” say the hands with eyes, and a mouth like a Siren’s beauty.

“Steve.” Danny sighs and shivers. He hates the cold, but the eyes with hands are unforgiving in keeping him trapped there. Freezing to death.

“You’re not freezing to death, Danny.” The hands with eyes always think they know best. It’s annoying. And untrue. He _is_ freezing to death. Hands with eyes know nothing.

“Danny, stop.”

“I’m not doing anything.” He isn’t. Not really. It’s mink Steve who’s doing all of the dancing and acrobatics. Danny just doesn’t want the mink to feel left out, and he’s really, really cold.

“Danny, please.” The hands with eyes sound tired and sad and mink Steve is frowning at Danny with lips that are more like Steve, Steve’s lips. It’s disconcerting.

Danny chases the lips with his own. The hands with eyes still, and the lips part, and there are blue eyes floating above the hands, above the lips, and there’s a moment of clarity where Danny realizes that he’s sitting in an ice bath and kissing Steve.

It’s sloppy and uncoordinated and Steve’s doing his best to extricate himself from the mess that is Danny’s altered state of mind, but then he’s not, and then there’s kissing, real kissing, and it’s the most wonderful thing Danny has ever done in his life. That’s not the fever talking, no matter what the little green man floating above Steve’s head says about it. He’s best ignored. Aliens aren’t real. Steve’s lips are. And they are amazing.

“Danny,” the hands with eyes say, pleading. “You’ve got a fever. You’re not thinking clearly.”

“Yes, I am,” Danny says.

He’s thinking clearly, maybe for the first time in his life. Maybe for the first time since he’d first set eyes on Steve all those yeas ago, guns trained on each other in a garage after the tragic death of Steve’s father.

“No, you’re not, but that’s okay.” The words are soothing. “We’ll get your fever down, then we’ll talk.”

Danny looks around at the menagerie of animals that surround him, and he wonders if they are helping the hands with eyes. They are staring at him like he’s missing something very important, except, for the life of him, Danny cannot figure out what it is that he’s missing.

The hands with eyes mutter something about a hurricane, and Danny hears winds howling, the ocean roaring, and he wonders what will happen to the animals if the storm hits. His eyes widen as he considers the fate of mink Steve, and Steve, Steve.

“Too cold,” Danny says. His teeth are chattering, and the octopus is adamant in keeping him in its inexorable clutches.

“It’s only for a little while longer,” he’s promised.

A little while longer feels like forever and the animals whirl around Danny’s head in a way that is dizzying and confusing, and the octopus tightens its grip when Danny tries to get away. He’s tired and shivering and missing Steve, and the kissing lips that were warm and soft and _home_.

“Finally,” the hands with eyes say, and there’s relief in the voice.

Danny blinks up at the hands and the circus vanishes. Mink Steve disappears in the next blink of Danny’s eyes, and then there’s just Danny and the hands with eyes and now there’s a face, and Danny realizes that it wasn’t the hands that had eyes, but rather a face. A face that he recognizes. A face that belongs to Steve.

There are lines around Steve’s eyes and mouth, and Danny wonders why the man looks so worried. He opens his mouth to ask just that, but the words don’t come out at all, just an odd sound that makes Steve look even more worried.

He wants to tell Steve not to worry, that he’s just fine, but the words come out all garbled, and then he’s being lifted and the world is tilting and Danny just wants to go to sleep. Or maybe steal another kiss, because those lips had been so invitingly warm and safe and they’d made his heart sing.

“Let’s get you dry and into bed.” Steve’s voice is rough, and his breath tickles Danny’s ear.

“‘Kay.” Danny manages to shake that word loose from his mouth, and he smiles because the thought of dry and warm and bed is wonderful.

Danny loses track of time. One second he’s standing, propped against Steve’s side, and the next he’s sitting, staring down at a kneeling Steve and wondering what Steve’s mouth would feel like on his own, and then he’s being manhandled out of wet boxers and there’s a towel, new, dry boxers, and then Danny makes the mistake of blinking and realizes that he’s missed several steps entirely as he’s lying down in bed, head resting on a soft, downy pillow, and blankets tucked up to his chin.

He wants Steve.

He can see Steve’s silhouette puttering around in the attached bathroom and realizes that he’s not in just any bed, but he’s in Steve’s bed. The thought of that brings him comfort, and Danny scrunches down a little so that he can smell Steve’s heady, masculine scent on the pillow and blankets. He breathes the scent in deeply and then sighs.

“How are you doing?” Steve asks. He’s standing in the doorway of the bathroom, leaning against the frame of the door. He looks exhausted.

Danny blinks, and when no circus animals appear out of thin air, he frowns. There’s a small part of him that misses the giraffe in the top hat, and the penguins, and mink Steve (he was so cute and cuddly, so charming), but then there’s the rational part of his brain that realizes none of them had been real. He’s a little sad.

“Okay,” Danny says. “I guess.”

“You really had me worried, Danno,” Steve says, and he crosses the room and sits on the bed beside Danny’s prone form, rests a hand on Danny’s thigh.

“Sorry,” Danny says, and he burrows himself a little deeper into Steve’s bed.

It’s comfortable, and safe, and it makes him feel like he’s wrapped up in Steve’s arms, which is a silly thought because the real Steve is sitting right next to him and all he’d have to do is open his mouth and ask for the real thing. He’s a little terrified at the thought, though. Now that he’s got his faculties about him (there’s a part of him that remembers, in bits and pieces, as though through a thick fog, like a dream, that he’d kissed Steve), he wonders what Steve would think of him if he did ask the other man to hold him. Would it weird the man out?

“It’s not your fault,” Steve says, and some of the worry lines around his eyes smooth out. “I’m just glad that I was able to get your fever to break. We really should get you to the hospital now that the winds from the hurricane that passed us have died down.”

Danny wonders how long he’s been lying in Steve’s bed. It feels like a few seconds, but it must have been longer than that.

“No,” Danny says, shaking his head and shuddering a little. “No hospitals.” He doesn’t have many good memories of being in hospitals, and he doesn’t feel feverish at all.

Steve’s eyes roam over Danny’s face, his hand squeezes Danny’s thigh, and though his lips are in a thin, straight line, he nods. “Okay, no hospitals.”

There’s a but in there. Danny recognizes it. He’s grateful that Steve doesn’t voice the rest of what he wants to say, because Danny doesn’t want things to get worse. He doesn’t want to add to the worry wrinkles on Steve’s face, and, cute as the little guy was, Danny doesn’t want to see mink Steve again.

“Hold me?” Danny asks in a whisper, the words slipping from his lips of their own accord. He shivers, and holds his breath as he waits for Steve’s answer.

The hand moves from his thigh, and Danny’s heart skips a beat. Him and his big, dumb mouth.

_Mink Steve is to blame for all of this_ , Danny thinks uncharitably. If mink Steve hadn’t been so affectionate with him, Danny would never have dreamed of being held by his best friend.

“Sorry,” Danny says, turning his head to the side and closing his eyes. “Forget it.”

The bed dips and then springs back up as Steve stands up, and Danny can feel tears pricking his eyelids. He’s probably lost his best friend because of those damn two words that his mouth decided to speak for him. His stupid, stupid mouth, and that stupid fever that made him hallucinate a cozy, cuddly mink Steve.

“Danny.” Steve’s voice is tight. “Look at me.”

Danny hunches his shoulders and he tunnels under the blankets to hide. It’s silly and something that Charlie might do if he was trying to escape getting up in the morning.

“Please,” Steve says. There’s something like desperation in the other man’s voice, and then there’s a hand on Danny’s shoulder, and Danny grumbles to himself as he extricates himself from the shelter he’d made in Steve’s blankets. He shivers a little at the sudden loss of warmth, even though only his face has escaped the close confines of the warm blankets.

He blinks owlishly up at Steve and holds his breath. The man has an indecipherable look on his face, his eyes moving to inspect Danny’s face, cataloguing who knows what. And then the facade cracks, and Steve’s smiling, eyes crinkling at the corners, not with worry, but with mirth.

“What’s so funny?” Danny asks, scowling.

Steve chuckles. “You look like a hedgehog, curled up in a ball with its quills out, and just its eyes showing.”

“I do not,” Danny protests, slipping a little more under the covers, and adding proof Steve’s ridiculous comparison. “At least I’m not a flirtatious mink,” Danny mutters beneath his breath.

“Scoot over,” Steve says.

“Don’t wanna,” Danny says. He’s feeling more and more like his five year old self than a grown man, and feels that Steve is to blame for it.

“C’mon, Danny,” Steve coaxes, adding a little pressure to Danny’s shoulder. “How’m I supposed to hold you if you won’t let me in the bed?”

“Go over to the other side,” Danny says, hope rising in his chest. It’s absolutely ridiculous. He sniffs a little at how silly it all is.

“You’re on my side of the bed,” Steve says.

“Since when do you have a side of the bed?” Danny asks, poking his head out from the blankets a smidge.

“Since forever,” Steve says. “Now, scoot over.”

“Fine,” Danny grunts, and he makes a show of moving over a few inches to allow Steve room to get in beside him. “It’s cold over here,” he complains. He shivers, and hates that he feels like a child.

“Stop being a baby, baby,” Steve says. He pulls the blankets up a little, wrenching them from Danny’s fingers, so that he can crawl beneath them.

And then Steve props himself against the headboard and tugs at Danny until Danny’s head is resting on his chest, and he’s nestled fully within Steve’s warm embrace, his body fitting perfectly within the folds of Steve’s. It’s every bit as comfortable as Danny had thought it would be and that’s a sobering thought. It’s terrifying as well, but Danny has little time to dwell on that thought as the sound of Steve’s heartbeat lulls him back to sleep far more quickly than it should.

When he next wakes, he’s disoriented for a moment, the sound of soft snores echo in his ears, and it takes him several heart pounding seconds to realize why he feels so safe and cozy and warm, and why there are two strong, sinewy arms wrapped around him. _Steve._ Steve hadn’t balked at Danny’s inane request to be held.

Danny closes his eyes and revels in the warmth of his friend, his maybe something more, and listens to the man’s gentle snores, lets them carry him back to healing sleep. Later, they’ll both wake, and talk about the kiss that feels like it was nothing more than a dream and yet everything Danny’d ever dreamed of having, and the fact that Steve didn’t run away when Danny asked to be held by him. The fact that Steve has a side of the bed, and Danny might have his own side, too, though he’ll fight that tooth and nail, because this is _his_ side of the bed (sprawled across Steve’s broad chest, nestled within the dips and grooves of his body), and Steve will simply have to adjust to that if he wants Danny in it. And that’s a very big if, but that’s an if for another time.


End file.
